The Supreme Court of India on Friday upheld the death sentence awarded to four men held guilty of raping and torturing a 23-year-old medical student on a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012. The court described the crime as a "story of a different world". The court referred to the dying declaration of the young woman and said the "brutal and demonic" crime had been proved beyond doubt.
"If ever a case called for hanging, this was it," said the three judges, confirming the death penalty handed by two courts. "Gruesome", "gross", "sadistic" and "beastly" were some of the words used by the judges. The verdict was pronounced in the presence of the parents of the woman who came to be known as "Nirbhaya" or fearless.
On December 16 2012, the physiotherapy student and her friend climbed onto a bus in south Delhi. The woman was gang-raped by six men for hours, brutalised with an iron rod and her intestines were pulled out. Later the girl and her friend were dumped on the road naked and bleeding. She died in a Singapore hospital 13 days later, leaving millions in shock.
"The accused were obsessed about ravishing her life, she was treated as an object of enjoyment," said the judges, noting that the offence created a "tsunami of shock". Four of the rapists were sentenced to death by a trial court in 2013. A year later, the high court confirmed it. But Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh moved the Supreme Court for mercy. Ram Singh, the bus driver, was found hanging in his cell in Tihar jail in March 2013, months before the rapists were convicted. The sixth convict was just short of 18 when he was arrested. He walked out of a correction home in December 2015 after spending three years.
"I am khush (happy)," said Nirbhaya's mother Asha Devi. Her father BN Singh, said, "It's not just a victory for my family, it's a victory for each and every woman in our country."
